The Year The World Turned Electro

By DJ Wanker
A version of this article originally appeared in Gscene Magazine.


When me and A-Dam - my balder and slightly shorter partner in musical crime - started Fuck The Pain Away back in 2003, we spent many a day agonising over how we should describe the night's music policy on the flyers.

The word "Electroclash" had been coined - and famously copyrighted - by New York bumboy DJ, Larry Tee at the end of 2001, and had become the generally accepted umbrella term to describe this new wave of rather weird but ever so fun alternative electronic Dance music that was then breaking out of everywhere from Berlin to Montreal.

The problem was that by early 2003, "Electroclash" had become a dirty word. It wasn't that it had had a bad press, it had had an exceedingly good press - but unfortunately in the style press. So putting "Electroclash" on a poster was like writing on it in huge letters; "WANT TO PAY CASH MONEY TO SPEND A NIGHT HAVING A LOAD OF CLUELESS TRENDY TWATS LOOKING DOWN THEIR NOSE AT YOU? WHY NOT COME HERE?"

The second reason was that a lot of the really early music just wasn't that good. If you listen to most of the first Electroclash compilation albums, much of it does seem like - as many said at the time - style over substance. A lot of the artists were the sort of people you wanted to support in their artistic endeavours; for one thing, no other genre in musical history has had so many queers and/or women so dominant - fact! And they were often pretty cool, and pretty politically sussed, too. But at best, you admired the attempt, not the execution. At its worst, it was like that Not The Nine O'Clock New's 80s pop pastiche Nice Video, Shame About The Song by "Lufthansa Terminal". (Ask your dad...).

More importantly, unlike now, a lot of the early tracks just didn't sound that good on the dancefloor. They were too arch and too painfully slow. Which is fine if you want to stand around a club projecting a studied ennui, but not much fun if you wanted to dance to Electropop like a robot from 1984... from 1984! (Incidentally, could someone please tell Arctic Monkeys that there aren't actually any robots in 1984 - dancing or otherwise?) So what should we put on the first FTPA flyers? The term "Electro" was just gaining currency then, only problem was, for music bores of a certain age (okay, me and A-Dam), "Electro" meant mid-80s' hard Hip Hop, like Afrika Bambaataa and Mantronix. Our problem was solved through those Chinese Whispers that happen on the scene; someone told me that he'd heard someone was starting "a gay Electroclash night" in Brighton. Okay, then... The first flyer hedged our bets slightly, billing Fuck The Pain Away as us playing "A sonic meringue of Electropunk...and the music formerly known a Electroclash." The last word there - thank Chomsky - soon disappeared into the dustbin of FTPA history. It was only once me and A-Dam had done a few nights, that we really realised what we were doing and, moreover, what people wanted: A Homo Electro Punk Disco. "Homo" cause it was for bumboys and lesbots (Our proudest achievements are making dykes feel welcome at our first venue, the "men-only" Storm, then getting gaylords to cut a rug with us at out our new home, Candy Bar). It was "Electro" cause people knew what this meant by then. Just about. "Punk" cause FTPA's always been a gloriously rough and ready, "unpretentious" lo-fi and low rent affair. And "Disco" - just cause it sounded good put on the end of the other three words.

Then, in early 2004, our pal, Q-Boy, the gay rapper, came up with "Electrotrash" to describe the FTPA sound. I've always really, really liked this, as I've always loved the music's more immediate and melodic punkier and poppier extremes - especially since my lobotomy. He's not two-thirds bad with words, that boy...

Part of the reason me and A-dam started FTPA was because back in the days when we were the fresh-faced warm-up DJs at Dynamite Boogaloo, we found we were both turning up with the same records every week, and they weren't really appropriate for that club. (When I played my first all Electro set there in 2002, someone came up to the DJ box afterwards and flounced; "Can you not play something a bit more up-to-date?") But we were also appalled at how there were no alternative gay club nights in Brighton, supposedly Britain's Mecca for all folk alternative and/or gay.

And now? As I quite enjoy saying to people when I'm in-no-way drunk and flicking the Vs and spent matches at them; "We were three years ahead of our time, weren't we?" The music got better, much better, and so did we, and - hey bingo - so did our club and, eventually, so did the Brighton gay scene. In 2003, if I wanted to go somewhere where the music wasn't absolute shit on a stick, it meant going to straight nights, like Boutique and Chaos Rocks. Now Electro is filtering into the gay scene from both directions, from Indie nights to House nights. (Though I still maintain that "Electro House" is a contradiction in terms - and there's an as annoying as fuck trend at the moment for nights to put "Electro' on their flyers when the music they play is nothing like Electro...). And 2006 finally - finally! - saw a quite amazing blossoming of new alternativequeer/gay/mixed/whatever/ whoever/who cares? club nights in Brighton, all challenging the hegemony of hideous "Funky Uplifting House", and rubbish gay nonsense in general. Yabba-dabba-fucking-doo!

A few nights floundered, but then that's our tiny little town for you - and, the fact that you stayed in watching Desperate Housewives/Newsnight rather than go out and support them.

The only problem now is, what do we call the music formerly known as "Electro"?